After we decided on doing the Dust-bunny concept for our animated short we began to generate more ideas on what our environment would be, how our bunnies would look and what real life bunnies we would take inspiration from for our designs, what our fox/hoover would look like and how we would make it easier to model in the software we would be using.
At first with our character concepts we were considering giving the bunnies two front legs, or “legs” which weren’t separate limbs but just pinched areas of the body.
We then concluded however that these bunnies pushed the limitation of no legs a bit too much and would be harder for us to model in blender, same thing with our initial concept of the hoover being an old fashioned push hoover. With that in mind we then started to brainstorm ideas of how we could make the bunnies and hoover much easier and simpler to create in blender. We started looking at other dust related character designs such as the dust mites from the studio Ghibli movie “Spirited Away” and more recent designs like the Pokémon Cosmog both the 2D version of it and the 3D model made for it.
These takes on dust inspired characters seemed to carry a theme of being quite round in shape with like in Cosmog’s case the “ear” like limbs are the only limbs that it appears to have. With that in mind we began developing ideas for our bunnies to have a much rounder appearance, with their ears actually being detached from their body and more floating like some form of physic connection to the dust bunny. That was when we started to consider how we could potentially use the detached ears to make special shapes above the bunny such as an exclamation mark for surprise or question marks for a better confused expression.
We decided that we preferred this more rounded look for the bunnies and so as we developed further we began to consider how we could potentially differentiate between these 4 dust bunnies we would have while also having them remain quite simple like how we had seen in the other dust themed designs we looked at. That is when I in particular started to consider different accessories the bunnies could have that may add a bit more character to each of them as well as how the ears could be used to create a difference between them.
I started to consider some types of string that could be stuck on the bunnies, possibly a lollipop stick the bunny may have picked up, maybe a button the bunny could have over one of the eyes and how some bunnies could have upright ears while another could have flopped over ones or maybe even one could have one upright and one lopped ear. This was the start of my creation progress for my own bunny character. We had found different real life bunny examples that we could reference from to create our bunny designs and one of these bunny examples, the one which drew me in the most conceptionally was that of the harlequin bunny which looked visually different from the other examples thanks to it’s distinctive half-n-half markings the breed are very well known for.
I enjoyed the idea of having a bunny which had a button over one of it’s eyes and so I experimented with this concept further to see how I could expand on this idea to incorporate it into an official design which I was happy to use for my final design of my bunny. We concluded that each of our bunnies would also have a desaturated pastel colour which we could use to make them seem different from each other and the desaturated colours would link it closer to real life dust which is often very desaturated in colour.
After generating a few different bunny designs that had different fluff, colours and buttons positions/holds. I really connected however with the fourth design which I created and so I decided to develop this design in particular further, concluding in the end that I didn’t particularly enjoy the concept of a piece of string holding the button up and instead I decided to just have the button float on the bunny’s eye.
I ended up staying this this design and as I started modelling it, I started calling the character Bean, which quickly became his name and a small personality was then built for him that he is a bunny which has been in the carpet for a long time and had been in a few run-ins with the hoover which could possibly explain why he is now missing an eye and has replaced it with a button he had found laying around.